For anyone who studies flows it seems that the hub and spoke system of distribution is alive and well. Much of this is because of the brilliance of the Fred Smith, founder and chairman of FedEx, when he wrote a Harvard business school report and business plan on transferring large Federal Reserve notes by aircraft and distributing them to the various that banks. I believe on his infamous college report he got only a C grade.
Although later, this spoke and hub concept went on to become the distribution model for FedEx, at the Memphis sort. It is often cited in business books as rather ironic because as we know this became one of the greatest companies of all-time, and FedEx has revolutionized the over-night shipping business and all of the distribution industry for that matter.
However, eventually FedEx also realized that taking packages all the way to the Memphis Sort and back again was not always the most efficient way to do it once they had many regional offices. Instead, it made sense to send some of those packages directly to the next regional office nearby, bypassing the hub. In doing so, they reverted some of their distribution to the point-to-point model, which has also re-taken hold in recent years, perhaps the reason why Boeing is building 737s (backlogged orders for years in advance in fact) still, and Airbus went for the A380 which can hold more people than a 747.
Now then, let's talk about how cell phone in data-packets move around, and are distributed. When you are on your cell phone it sends that data to the nearest cell tower, and at cell tower the data either goes to a landline, and takes the information across the country, to its intended destination, which may be another cell tower to another mobile user, or to someone with a landline.
Okay so, what if all the data went from your personal tech smart-cell-phone-device to another personal cell phone device directly, bypassing the cell tower? What if there were other phones in the area and you were making a local call, it might hop three-or-four cell phones to get there, never once going to the cell tower; like a walkie-talkie, rather than a trunked two-way radio.
That would make sense because most cell phone calls are local calls, and nowadays the people using their cell phone are calling or texting someone nearby them in the same city within a 3 mile radius, and it just happens to be about the same radius for the cell towers. If you will recall before 3G wireless, the cell towers were 10 miles apart, and then they were 3 miles apart.
But even if the person you are contacting was 15 miles away, the data-packets could go from your cell phone, to someone else's cell phone 3 miles away, to someone else's cell phone 3 miles away, and then to the cell phone you are calling, and each time it would bypass the cell tower completely, unless the intended receiver was at a landline. But why would you wish to do that you ask?
It's simple really, because you can put more users on the network, if you are using the cell towers less. As in 20-times as many, and that's a lot of data flow, and a much more efficient model, for at least a good chunk of the traffic. Major cost savings is an understatement.
This could save tens of billions of dollars in the construction of new cell towers for the up-and-coming 4 G & 5G wireless strategies which will be our future system in mobile technologies. Since cell phones are already a send and receive device, this could easily be accomplished. And as long as everyone had extended battery life of their personal communication devices such as iPad or smart phone, companies like Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T could make more money and have less capital expenditure.
This would relate directly to greater quarterly profits, and perhaps a good size reduction in everyone's cell phone bill. In doing this, it would give consumers more privacy, because their data would never go to a cell tower where it could be compromised, or intercepted by those who wanted access to it. Such as our government for instance, and so let's talk a little bit about that:
Whenever we leave backdoors in our technology to allow the good guys to look at the data, or information that is flowing through, we inadvertently gives access to the bad guys, as they search the software code for those secret gates which allow our intelligence agencies in, in the first place.
By sending the data packets of information from phone to phone, where they will be accumulated by the receiving phone as they come in, each packet would be highly dispersed, and unreadable, or irrelevant in and of itself. However all the data packets coming together in the receiving phone would display the message, or the voice phone message for the intended user.
There are pros and cons to not being able to monitor all that data, such as this use of smart-phone technology by; smart mob protesters, ELF homegrown terrorists, or even terrorists planning an attack, or planting roadside bombs. This is because you couldn't intercept the cell phone transmission by its electronic serial number or ESN at the cell tower anymore, as most of the traffic would bypass.
Now let's consider the issues where a group of terrorists with machine guns tried to take over a hotel in Mumbai, since they were all using cell phones, the government of India could have intercepted that information at the cell tower, and therefore they could've caught them and prevented that chaos before the terrorists had started. But, if also cell phones are working like walkie-talkies on steroids and more like the Internet model in sending their packets of information all over the place all coming together any individual terrorist cell phone as they communicated, they be virtually unstoppable.
You can see that's a serious problem, however, you can see where it would be wonderful to be able to expand the number of users on any given cell phone network, freeing up frequencies, and have each of the phones talking to each other delivering the data as if they were a node or mote in a system of distribution which used cell towers sometimes, and peer-to-peer personal tech device at other times, or a combination thereof. Actually rerouting traffic with whatever was best for the network at the time, which is almost like how the Internet works anyway isn't it? Almost but not quite.
Therefore, if we used a strategy of point-to-point, plus hub and spoke, we get the best of all worlds, and we can increase network traffic, as perhaps 70 or 80% were freed up. Thus, we could take on more data too, allow more onboard data transfer for video projection, holographic movies, downloadable movies on the go, etc. However, there are also problems with this, which need to be addressed, along with the increased efficiency, and added privacy for the end-user. Please consider all this.
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